


ella bailaba solo (she danced alone)

by ninemoons42



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dancing, Dancing together, First Meetings, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Inspired By Tumblr, Inspired by Music, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill, Rogue One - some of them live, Street music, Tumblr Prompt, background spiritassassin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-13 12:49:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10514100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: There are as many ways and methods and reasons for the dance as there are human emotions, as Cassian Andor learns during one of his rare weekends off: some people dance to celebrate a relationship, while others dance to celebrate changes in their lives.He dances mainly to feel the joy in a life that is mostly overwhelmed with work.And then he meets someone who dances because of her grief and because of those who are missing.





	

As soon as his shoe touches the sidewalk, as soon as he’s safely perched upon the cobblestones and the pooled drifting soft sand of the old quarter of the city, as soon as he turns into the swift rushing breeze that is scented with the rising sap in the palm trees and the constant salt of the ocean -- he feels tugged, he feels like he’s being pulled, and he doesn’t stop to question or to hesitate. Behind him the speeches and the maneuvering and the furtive conversations in wind-swept corners; behind him the forests upon forests of fallen trees pressed and processed into paper, printed words and publications and the stultifying drone of policy and politics.

But he’s got two whole days to stop thinking about meetings, about snatched lunches several hours late, about stale cups of coffee and sleeping beneath a desk that’s already bowed under the weight of his books and his binders and a decrepit desktop computer that’s only a little bit younger than he is -- and by god, he is going to forget about all of these things, and die in the attempt, if he should die over the next two days.

With every step that he takes, dodging around and around the whirl of the tourists and of the children let loose from an afternoon’s homework, he feels his heart and his feet growing lighter.

As soon as he hears the music he breaks into a run: the lively strains of a fast-paced song. Hands clapping and voices calling out encouragement.

Cassian spins around a gaggle of matrons already contemplating the tenth stop on their shopping trip, laughs as several girls in long skirts and crumpled blouses look up from their books and their mobile phones, keeps pace with a handful of stray dogs and one sleek-looking black cat as they dart past the mouth of an alleyway crammed with wickerwork chairs and tables set with cheerfully cracked and pitted plates, and leaps towards a triangular corner in a chained-off intersection. No cars or trucks or bicycles allowed past this point, and none could have gotten through anyway, not with the ragged cluster of musicians occupying one point of the triangle, and not with the people surrounding them, bouncing to the infectious beat.

He takes it all in with his appreciative eyes.

Two men in their usual place, propped up by one of the ornate street lamps, splash of colored-glass mosaic suspended from wind-weathered patinated curves of iron and electric wire. One of the men is wearing a plain white shirt, the snowy stretch of it snug over his broad chest and the slight jut of his belly. The ragged ends of his waist-length hair are stirred about by the constant breeze. Tucked into the crook of one muscular arm is a worn roll of cracked and aged leather, wrapped carefully around half a dozen knives: and Cassian knows that one is used for carving meat and another is used for filleting fish; there is a cleaver and there is a paring knife; and he can’t remember what the others are used for, if they’re not used for eating. 

Next to that man is his companion, reed-slender and straight-shouldered, and almost always dressed in severe black. Today is no exception, that black taking the form of a suit jacket and a stiff-collared shirt. His close-cropped hair nevertheless reveals the silvering edges of age, slowly but surely overtaking him, though he seems indifferent enough to it if that constant serene smile of his, just playing at the edges of his stern-looking mouth, is any indication.

As Cassian watches, the man in black smiles and shifts his feet, and starts toward the music: and the man in white catches the hand questing in his direction. Twirls his companion in an extravagant turn, and in just a few steps they are near the center of the space left clear in the center of the triangle, and when they dance their movements are far too sharp and far too fluid, leaping and kicking and weaving around each other, dancing and fighting all at once in the exact same pantomimed motions of kick and flourish and parry.

He can’t help but shout to the two men, who spin more and more quickly around each other and now there is no one else dancing: the wide smile on the man in black’s face, and the determined grimace on the man in white’s, the rhythm of the music thrumming like adrenaline in the blood, like fire in the wind, the drums beating and beating and the two men leaping nearly in unison, hands tracing complicated patterns as they storm through the final repetitions of the chorus and then, with a crash like a gunshot, coming to a sudden dead standstill.

Cassian leads the applause and the whooping, and the crowd around him echoes his glee -- but he is also close enough to a gaggle of bystanders to hear the shock in their voices.

For the man in black is reaching into his pocket to produce something short and white -- which he then snaps out into a long and thin white cane. It won’t bear his weight, but it wasn’t made to do that: the man simply taps it along the cobbled street and steps off, back to the street lamp, with his burly companion hovering constantly at his shoulder. 

“I didn’t think he was blind,” whispers a woman in that knot of onlookers.

“You don’t need eyes to dance,” one of her companions replies.

The musicians start in again on something slow but intense, a drone that is equal parts mesmerizing and threatening, and Cassian is also familiar with the man who tiptoes into the open space. It was only a few months ago that he had sported short hair; now his hair touches his shoulders in short straggling waves, steadily growing longer and longer still. Long hair, and stubble creeping down toward the collar of his colorful tunic -- blue and purple and green today, worn over plain buff-colored trousers.

As Cassian watches, as new notes drop here and there into the steady cadences, this dancer drops into a crouch, the knuckles of one fist resting gently on the stones -- and then he unfolds, lanky grace, and starts to move. Deliberate and steady, knowing, his hands and feet always in the right places: the music moves him, and he forms the music, gesturing it into being. 

He would be gravity, he would be dignity -- but he’s not entirely above levity, and so Cassian laughs with the crowd when the man segues from his forms into a soft-shoe shuffle, and then into a very slow version of the moonwalk.

The dancer’s smile is as brilliant as the blue skies overhead, as he leaps into the final pose, before bowing and stepping back towards the drums. He takes up one of the instruments, a small box of wood and hide and brightly tied cords.

“Anyone?” the leader of the musicians calls, then.

Murmurs all around, heads being shaken, steps backward.

Cassian wants to hear the wild whirling rhythms of the guitars, of the drums -- wants to hear that leader sing in her hoarse powerful rasp, her long hair flying wildly around her face as she spins and spins and her skirts twirl around her knees -- 

“I will,” says a voice, rough with emotion, low and carrying and freezing him to the spot.

He’s been in this country long enough to have a better understanding of some of its customs: celebrations at table and ceremonial toasts. The parties thrown for those who would be baptized and those who would be wed. The importance placed upon a graduation, upon a promotion, upon a retirement. 

He’s also heard about some of the old ways, the traditional ways, nurtured and remembered and cherished by those who were older. Ways that had once been outlawed and that had once been prohibited, now allowed back out into the blazing sunlight and the fresh breezes, and it was rare to see younger people perform those old ceremonies, those old rituals.

But the young woman now stepping out of the crowd has tears in her eyes that will not flow out onto her cheeks, seeming to be pinned by the way she’s holding her chin up with pride, by the way her lips are pressed together into a thin line.

And Cassian knows he’s staring -- the whole circle of people is staring, eyes fixed on her, eyes fixed on the portraits that she is wearing.

Two large photographs pinned to her chest.

Cassian looks at the man, first: the same cheekbones, the same determined twist in the mouth, and there can be no doubt that he must be the young woman’s father. There are lines in that photograph-frozen face that speak of age, and also of terrible memories and terrible deeds. That sad sad frown and those slumped shoulders, such a contrast to the mourning pride of his daughter. Tear-tracks on that old face.

Then, the photograph of the woman, pinned over the girl’s heart, and Cassian can see the resemblance right in the eyes. Eyes full of fury and of righteousness, and of a rage that seems to live, wild and willful, in the girl in the center of the circle. Rage that seems to tower over her, that seems to still animate that frozen and captured image.

“My name is Jyn Erso,” the girl with the photographs says. “I -- I would like to dance, with -- with my parents. For my parents. They said I had to ask you to play a specific song -- ”

“Not a specific song, but a specific kind of music,” the leader of the musicians says. “We know of only one cueca, though.”

“Please will you play it?” Jyn Erso asks.

And Cassian watches as she looks down ruefully at herself. Jacket and blouse and denims -- black from head to toe, from the ribbon tying her hair to the buckles on belt and boots. She has no flowers in her hair, and no skirts trimmed in lace and embroidery and beads -- but she does have a white handkerchief, which she pulls out of her pocket, and holds to her heart. 

The leader of the musicians takes an accordion from one of her companions, and says, “Dance,” to Jyn Erso.

And the music rises around them in that cobblestoned space, mournful and solemn -- and in the center of it all, the girl with the photographs begins to dance.

Round and round in slowly turning circles. She gestures with her handkerchief, dipping and waving it, slow long arcs. She tracks a winding spiral, bowing and straightening, turning and turning so that everyone can see the faces of the ones she’s dancing for.

He knows, from the quiet conversations he’s overheard among the musicians who are now singing, quietly, so as not to distract from the girl who is still dancing, that the cueca is meant to be danced with a partner -- that it is meant to be a courtship ritual or else a playful performance, agile and acrobatic and full of raucous life.

Danced this way, sad and slow and winding and solo, it’s transformed into a manifestation of speechless and overwhelming grief.

He steps out of the circle anyway, and joins the girl -- he knows some of the steps, knows that in this case he has not come courting. Knows that in this case he has come to support her in her mourning.

He keeps his distance from her -- she is, after all, dancing with the man and with the woman, and not with him.

The man playing the guitar next to the leader of the musicians throws him a black handkerchief, and he nods thanks, and continues to track long spiraling circles around Jyn Erso.

The tears flow freely, now, on her face, onto the faces frozen in the photographs that she is wearing.

The music falls to a dramatically low end, petering away into the whisper of the wind, and Jyn Erso nods to the musicians and to their leader.

Finally, she turns to him.

He holds her eyes and wills her to understand that she has his sympathy, should she need it.

She nods to him, as well, and walks out of the circle.

So he stumbles back into the crowd and the man in black is there, offering him a paper cup. “You did well,” he says.

Cassian shakes his head. Gulps at the lukewarm water in the cup. “I don’t know all the steps.”

“That did not matter to her,” the man in black says. “What matters is that you knew what she was doing, and that you danced to show her that you understood.”

“I never danced for my family either -- we didn’t have anything like that.”

“Learn,” the man in white says, as he steps to his companion’s side. “And if there is another opportunity for you to dance the cueca, then you can dance it for them. Dance it with her if she’s so willing.”

Cassian nods, and looks at the space that is still left behind in the crowd, the space that had parted to allow Jyn Erso to exit the circle, after her dance.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic comes from the song "They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo)" by Sting. Here is one of his live performances of the song, done in Chile: [click here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4K_q3XNHkY).
> 
> Pretty serious subject matter, I know, and I live in a country of forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. That's why this song has had such an impact on me.
> 
> Written for Prompt Ten: "music" at [@rebelcaptainprompts](http://rebelcaptainprompts.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr. Prompt Ten was provided by [@imsfire2](http://imsfire2.tumblr.com/).
> 
> I am also on tumblr myself -- look me up [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
